Saturday, 12 December 2015

Our editor's pick of this week's 10 best psychology and neuroscience links:

A Decade of Delights
Ten years ago I launched the Research Digest blog and on Wednesday in London we held a party to celebrate (also check out BPS President Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes' report on the event).

Visual Effort and Inattentional Deafness
The media have lapped up a new study, implying that it makes the novel finding that when concentrating on a visual task we become deaf to our surroundings. In fact, explains attention expert Dan Simons, this behavioural effect has been shown before (the novelty of the study was in its brain-based findings), and the press were wrong to describe the effect as "inattentional blindness".

Screwed Up, Little Despots?
Alice Violett at The Psychologist finds the roots of the negative stereotypes about only children in the prejudice of 19th century psychologists.

Possessed By A Mask
Every human culture has used masks for ritual disinhibition, shaming and play. Is being online the ultimate masquerade? An Aeon magazine essay by Sandra Newman.

A Paradigm Shift for the Motor Cortex?Neuroskeptic reports on a new review paper that argues Roger Penfield's seminal idea that the motor cortex contains a body map is wrong, or at least only half the story. In fact, argues the review author Michael Graziano, the motor cortex contains areas that encode different complex actions.